Abstract

Background: Acute leukemia is the most common malignant disease in children. Some genetic abnormalities have been recognized to have prognostic or therapeutic relevance. Objective: To analyze the clinical presentations, laboratory features, and genetic abnormalities in childhood acute leukemia patients. Materials and methods: It was a descriptive cross-sectional study on childhood acute leukemia patients who admitted to the hospital between November, 2017 and May-2022. Results: There were 83 new patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) (70.3%) and 35 patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) (29.7%), the ratio of male to female was 1.51:1. The median age was 5.8 ± 4.0 years. The most common symptoms were anemia (87.3%), hepatomegaly (48.3%), enlarged lymph nodes (44.9%), fever (44.9%), splenomegaly (41.5%), bleeding (39.8%) and bone pain (21.2%). Regarding laboratory features, white blood cell (WBC) median is 12.3x109/l, there is 28.8% of the patients with WBC ≥ 50x10 9/l. Platelet (PLT) median is 43,5x10 9/l, there is 75.4% patients with PLT < 100x109/l. Hemoglobin (Hb) mean is 8.0 ± 2.3 g/dl, there is 78.9% patients with Hb < 10 g/dl. In ALL, genetic analysis showed that 18.1% patients have NUDT15 polymorphism, 6.9% patients have TPMT polymorphism, 12.1% patients have TEL/AML1, 4.8% patients with BCR/ABL1, 2.4% patients with MLL/AF4, 3.6% patients with E2A/PBX1 and 1.2% patient with SET/NUP214. In AML, the percentage of AML1/ ETO, AML1/ETO+BCR/ABL1, PML/RARA, MLL/AF6 and KMT2A/MLLT10 were 14.2%, 2,9%, 8.6%, 5.7% and 2.9% respectively. Conclusions: The most common clinical presentations were anemia, hepatosplenomegaly, fever, enlarged lymph nodes, bleeding and bone pain. Some genetic abnormalities help classification, prognosis and treatment for childhood acute leukemia.